The Grocery Manufacturers Association. Not a group we hear from a lot on a site dedicated to cleaner vehicle technology. Today, though, in preparation for Earth Day, we saw a message from the GMA titled "This Earth Day, an Unlikely Foe: Biofuels" and wanted to see what they had to say. As the headline suggests, the GMA is taking a stance against biofuels made from food sources and all of the problems that can occur thanks to "the rush to find a 'homegrown' solution to global warming." The GMA invited three people - Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, and Jonathan Lewis of the Clean Air Task Force - to Washington, D.C. this week to speak out against using food sources to make biofuels. The short list of what's wrong with growing crops to make fuel are:

• increased environmental damage in the form of pollution from coal-fired ethanol refineries
• runoff from fertilizer
• rapid deforestation in the developing world
• an inflationary effect on food prices
• potential to prove a major setback to organic farming

We've heard a lot of criticisms of corn-based ethanol in the past, but that the drive to grow more corn for ethanol could hurt the organic farming movement in the U.S. is a new one. Makes sense to me, though. More details in the press release after the jump.